Lecture 5: Reader-Response Criticism

 

Objectives

By the end of the lesson the students will be able to:

• Understand the theory of reader response, which focuses on the reader’s reading experience.
• Apply the reader-response methodology to works of literature.
• Engage in the writing process of a peer writer, including peer review.
• Review and evaluate a variety of reader-response papers by peer writers.
• Draft and revise a reader-response paper on a literary work.

 

Origin of the Theory

 

   Reader response criticism was quite significant in the 1970s and had its source in Germany in the Konstanz School where Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser were active. Like the Geneva School, the Konstanz School was quite aware that a literary work doesn’t exist on the page, only instructions for constructing it exist there. Literary works, therefore, only truly exist insofar as they are constituted in the consciousness of a reader. Reception theorists insist that a text does not simply exist in itself, but that it exists as part of a shifting relationship with readers over time. Meaning, therefore, is not a property of the text itself but rather a function of the experience of the reader in the act of reading the text. The text is a constantly re-forming construct. Hans Robert Jauss sees the text as historically defined by the meeting of the historical moments of the text and the reader. For Jauss, there is no single fixed point of reference, no absolutely imperative original meaning, but rather a succession of moments of reception, each one affected by the expectations, tastes, and aims of the ‘receivers’. But that said, how do readers actually constitute a text? What do we do with the instructions on the page? How do we handle aspects of a text for which information isn’t given? Wolfgang Iser famously spoke of gaps, blanks that the reader is required to fill in utilizing implication, reason, fantasy, and so on. 

   In America, Norman Holland, a psychoanalytical critic, investigated how readers read subjectively, arguing that reading a text properly never actually happens, given all the personal psychological issues we transfer onto the experience of reading. For example, it’s difficult to imagine reading a novel without identifying with or against certain characters. Whether we like a novel or not seems to have quite a bit to do with our psychological makeup, which is why, for example, feminism became very popular, given that it promoted literary readings women could identify with and get excited about in terms of their content. Reader response, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology are sympathetic critical orientations. What tends to turn critics away from such approaches is that they are perceived to argue for reading as an arbitrary subjective act, which is problematic when one considers that in a research institution like a university, one is supposed to be getting at absolute truth, never mind the process of how one reads (5.7) David Bleich, another American theorist of reader-response, explores not only the effects of a text on individuals but also the processes whereby groups cooperate and negotiate meanings with the aim at arriving at a consensus-even if the practice is not achieved.

Other poststructuralist, modernist, Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial theorists were engaged with authors, texts, and readers. Each challenged the idealizations of “the reader” or “readers” from their respective approaches. They have contributed to the notion of reading as rewriting in literary and cultural studies. Roland Barthes for example distinguished “readerly” (lisible) and “writer” (scriptible) texts. Readerly texts offer the reader the pleasure (plaisir) of total immersion in and identification with a supposedly self-sufficient and closed fictional world (an example would be Mills and Boon romances and certain kinds of “classic realism”. Writerly texts offer the reader the joy/ecstasy (jouissance) of participation in the construction of a fictional world which is openly in process and always in the making (examples would be everything from Joyce’s Ulysses and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby to interactive story-books and virtual reality games, see metafiction). However, Barthes modified this distinction. He recognized that it is also the reader (not only the author or the text) who controls how far a text shall be read as “closed” or “open”, “readerly” or “writerly”.

           Makhil Bakhtin is another critical theorist who challenged any hard-and-fast distinction between the activities of reading and writing. He insists that words are “sites of struggle” to be defined in the dialogic interplay between competing discourses and voices which means that every utterance is Junas-like. (junas-like:   Janus, in Roman religion, was the god of all beginnings and was represented by a double-faced head) (http://www. Britannica.com). It looks both back and forwards: back to past utterances to which it is a response, and forwards to future utterances which anticipate in response. In this way, Bakhtin, response-ability or “answerability” is the prerogative of both writers and readers alike. However, for Bakhtin, responses can never be purely “personal” (in the sense of being “wholly authenticated by one’s own experience” and expressed “in one’s own words”) precisely because of one’s own experience and words are always already implicated in those of others. Jacques Derrida has also greatly influenced models of reading and writing. Derrida insists that both writers and readers are involved in the continual displacement and deferral of meaning because they both use and are used by language. The ceaseless differences within and between words, within and between texts, ensure that there is no fixed point of departure or arrival in the process of writing-reading, and therefore no stable distinction between writer and reader. Derrida sums up this view arguing « that it is writing that suffered the repression by being considered a mere reduction or redaction of the spoken word (Harold, 1997, p. 108).

Defining Reader Response

    Reader Response is a critical theory that stresses the importance of the role of the reader in constructing the meaning of a work of literature.  Lois Tyson offers this definition: “Reader-response theory…maintains that what a text is cannot be separated from what it does…reader-response theorists share two beliefs: (1) that the role of the reader cannot be omitted from our understanding of literature and (2) that readers do not passively consume the meaning presented to them by an objective literary text” (170). Reader-response theorists recognize that texts do not interpret themselves. Even if all of our evidence for a certain interpretation comes from the work itself, and even if everyone who reads the text interprets it in the same (as improbable as that might be) it is still we, the readers, who do the interpreting, assigning meaning to the text.  Reader response criticism not only allows for but even interests itself in how these meanings change from reader to reader and from time to time. 

     Among many dramatic changes in literary theory over the past thirty years, one of the most striking has been the growing prominence of what has come to be called reader-response criticism. Building on M. H. Abrams’s well-known “triangle” of the author, work, and reader, Terry Eagleton has, in fact, characterized the history of modern literary theory as occurring in three stages: a Romantic “preoccupation with the author,” a New Critical “exclusive concern with the text;” and finally, “a marked shift of attention to the reader over recent years”(1983, 74). The various theories of reader response are characterized as sharing a concern with how readers make meaning from their experience with the text. While literary criticism is equally concerned with making meaning, the focus is generally more on extracting meaning from the text rather than making explicit the processes by which readers, or the critic, make meaning. In some cases, they refer to, or characterize a hypothetical reader's responses; less commonly, the responses of actual readers are cited as evidence for claims about the reader/text transaction. These theories, therefore, assume that the text cannot be understood or analyzed as an isolated entity. It is often assumed that reader-response criticism represents a relatively unified position. 

 

According to Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser, the focus is on the experience of an individual reader. For the reader, the work is what is given to the consciousness; one can argue that the work is not something objective, existing independently of any experience of it, but it is the experience of the reader.  Like phenomenology, we can suspend the ultimate reality or knowability of the world and describe it as it is given to consciousness.  Criticism can thus take the form of a description of the reader’s progressive movement through a text, analyzing how readers produce meaning by making connections and filling things left unsaid.

   Writers who have been called “reader-response critics” embrace an extremely wide range of attitudes toward, and assumptions about, the roles of the reader, the text, and the social/cultural context shaping the transaction between reader and text. One particularly contentious issue has centered on the relative influence of the reader, the text, and the reading situation on how the reading transaction is shaped. Steven Mailloux (39-53) has charged, on the one hand, that some reader-response critics who privilege the influence of the text on readers’ responses are no more than New Critics in disguise, assuming that at the bottom, the text determines (or ought to determine) everything else. On the other hand, some critics have come very close to insisting that the text is no more than an inkblot, whose meaning is created entirely by the reader. And, more recently, still, others have argued that to focus exclusively on the reader/text trans-action is to ignore the crucial influence of social, cultural, or situational contexts on the nature of this transaction.

       It is also necessary to bear in mind that many theorists who might not identify themselves as reader-response critics have, in recent years, expressed increasing interest in the meaning and conduct of the reader/text transaction. Such critics and scholars come from a wide range of different disciplinary perspectives as feminism, Marxism, phenomenology, rhetoric, perceptual and cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis, pragmatics, and aesthetics.

 

Summary

 

  This type of criticism does not designate anyone's critical theory but focuses on the activity of reading a work of literature. Reader-response critics turn from the traditional conception of a work as an achieved structure of meanings to the responses of readers as their eyes follow a text. By this shift of perspective, a literary work is converted into an activity that goes on in a reader's mind, and what had been features of the work itself-including narrator, plot, characters, style; and structure-are less important than the connection between a reader's experience and the text. It is through this interaction that meaning is made.

This is the school of thought most students seem to adhere. Proponents believe that literature has no objective meaning or existence. People bring their thoughts, moods, and experiences to whatever text they are reading and get out of it whatever they happen to based on their expectations and ideas.

 

References

 

Crosman, Robert. ‘Do Readers Make Meaning?’ The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Ed. Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.149–64.

Davis, Todd F., and Kenneth Womack, eds. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Criticism. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001.

Donoghue, Denis. The Practice of Reading. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: the University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

Flynn, Elizabeth A. ‘Gender and Reading.’ Flynn and Schweickart, Gender and Reading 267–88.

Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. London: Methuen, 1987.

Gibson, Walker. ‘Authors, Speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers.’Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism 1–6.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 3 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988–94.

Greetham, D. C. Theories of the Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response. 1968. New York: Norton, 1975.

——. ‘Unity, Identity, Text, Self.’ Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism 118–33.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. 1972. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.